The core problem with this part of the book, which forms the bulk of the narrative, is that Cherryh doesn’t really give us a sense of the politics at play for an apparently excellent diplomat (the paidhi is selected through vigorous competition amongst many humans), Bren is singularly bad at telling us what the politics in play are, and instead, Foreigner spends an awful lot of time telling us how uncomfortable Bren is with the atevi‘s different emotional life to his own, and how isolated this makes him feel. The real plot of the novel follows Bren, the human envoy to the atevi, the only one allowed contact with them, in the wake of an assassination attempt and the fallout from that it’s a mixture of complex politics and interpersonal relationships that don’t work as a human would expect them to.
Foreigner is also probably the most highly praised of all Cherryh’s science fiction work, and it seemed to me high time I actually read the book…įoreigner opens with a series of sections that introduce us to the world the main body of the plot actually takes place in humans, stranded on a colony ship impossibly far from home by some kind of navigational accident, make planetfall and contact with an alien species called the atevi, fundamentally humanoid but on a bigger scale and universally black. Cherryh as the primary influence on her work the Foreigner series in particular. The work of an isolated lunatic?…The interests of a particular faction?…Or the consequences of one human’s fondness for a species which has fourteen words for betrayal and not a single word for love?Īnn Leckie, of Ancillary fame, has often cited C. Then the sole human the treaty allows into atevi society is marked for an assassin’s bullet. Now, nearly two hundred years after that conflict, humanity has traded its advanced technology for peace and an island refuge that no atevi will ever visit.
It was a war that humans had no chance of winning on this planet so many light-years from home. On this alien world, law was kept by the use of registered assassination, alliances were defined by individual loyalties not geographical borders, and war became inevitable once humans and one faction of atevi established a working relationship.
It had been nearly five centuries since the starship Phoenix, lost in space and desperately searching for the nearest G5 star, had encountered the planet of the atevi.
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